Developments in information processing, telecommunications and computing have enabled business persons to literally take their office with them while traveling. With the advent of DVD-R discs and multi-gigabyte hard drives for information storage, a virtually limitless amount of information becomes portable. With mobile phones and an ability to remotely retrieve e-mail, business persons can be contacted when they are traveling as readily as when they are in the office. With a WiFi- or WiMax-enabled lap top computer, the information content of the Internet becomes available.
Notwithstanding these developments, access to and retrieval of information can be problematic. For example, some mobile phones are capable of providing access to the Internet. But unless a user has a fairly high comfort level and degree of familiarity with portable computing and telecommunication devices, accessing and retrieving data in this fashion can be daunting and difficult. In particular, the access and authentication procedures required to (1) gain access a network; (2) gain access to a server on the network; and (3) download content from the server to a mobile phone are complicated. Rather than dealing with this challenge, many if not most mobile-phone users will simply not use this capability.
Another barrier to use of the Internet-access capability of mobile phones relates to the hesitancy of users to provide credit card information during the purchase and download of content.
As a consequence, there is a need for improvements in the way information can be accessed by a user via a wireless terminal, such as a mobile phone.